President Obama’s Cairo speech in 17 languages
The White House website announced that the State Department has prepared translations of President Obama’s major “A New Beginning” speech delivered at Cairo University .
There are translations into 13 languages so far: Arabic, Chinese, Dari, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Turkish, Urdu and Portuguese. And at the time of my writing this post, the Dari, Hebrew, and Malay translations were listed as “in progress”.
Also, the White House is promoting a 3 min. 30 sec. mini-documentary video in English, “Muslim Americans Serving in the U.S. Government”.
Hope to see more of this from the White House!
Tags: Arabic, Cairo, Chinese, Dari, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, Obama, Pashto, Persian, Portuguese, President, Punjabi, Russian, Turkish, Urdu, White House
Hmmm David, I couldn’t find any info on why these particular languages were chosen over others. It’s a very interesting selection of languages, and I wonder if they explain anywhere why they began with them.
But NOT in Finnish!!! Discrimination, racial profiling . . . I’m going on strike!!!
Maybe you should offer to work at the State Department so they can have a Finnish translation!
But seriously, yeah, I wonder about this. I looked a little on the State Dep’t website but couldn’t find more info.
Did find one more not-so-subtle example of how “other languages” are implied to link to “liberal extremist” views, as if there is only one, conservative, “English”, from The Stiletto Blog. (see beginning where they say
Translate to Spanish please! I’m a bit puzzled why it is translated to Portuguese and not Castellano…there must be dozens of Spanish-speakers in the Obama administration who could knock out a quick translation!